Word: antiformalist
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Form has a way of decaying into formalism, especially when the original form was antiformalist. Nowadays Japanese department stores carry rows of cases displaying tea bowls and caddies; new ones-never mind the old, which may cost more than a suburban house-bear price tags of $15,000. If one suggests that this is steep for a new teacup, however dense with sabi and wabi it may be, one is told that such objects are signed on the box by a noted living tea master. This imprimatur, a fabulously profitable extension of Marcel Duchamp's solitary act of declaring...
...goes through the show, skillfully boiled down by the Smithsonian's curator of 20th century painting, Walter Hopps, from Rauschenberg's enormous and dispersed output of combines, paintings, silk screens, sculptures and prints, it becomes plain that there has not been much antiformalist American art that Rauschenberg's prancing, careless and fecund talent did not either hint at or directly provoke. It is to him that is owed much of the basic cultural assumption that a work of art can exist for any length of time, in any material (from a stuffed goat to a live human body), anywhere...
...states Portraitist Elaine de Kooning, "is to be falsified." Eva [Hesse, the brilliantly gifted German-born sculptor who died two years ago of a brain tumor at the age of 34, is a case in point: her work belonged, and contributed on exactly level terms, to the kind of antiformalist direction in American sculpture that Robert Morris' felt pieces and Carl Andre's floor sculpture also represented...
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